Odd. I was using a spam-fighting solution that utilizes MT-Blacklist as the source of information on what bad stuff to filter. That, plus the black/white lists that are mentioned in the solution was serving me well - for a time.
Eventually, I started seeing more and more blog spam in my site. Grrr. Come to find out, I was getting a 403 Forbidden error with the script that retrieved the MT-Blacklist data and pumped it into my database. It showed up fine through my browser, so they (the guy running MT-Blacklist) must have blocked my website's IP address explicitly. Bummer.
I don't get it. It was only updating once a day. There's no reason it should have been noticed, let alone a nuisance. Oh well. So now, I scraped the data manually and shoved it into my database. I guess I'll have to do that periodically to keep up to date until he takes me off his block list OR there's a better solution.
Man, the last thing I need fighting the war on spam on my site is for the anti-spam guys to be against me.
Later.